I live, I live, with an absolutely continuous sense of failure. I am always defeated, always. Every book is the wreck of… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
Almost any tale of our doings is comic. We are bottomlessly comic to each other. Even the most adored and beloved person… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
There is no triumph of good, and if there were it would not be a triumph of good. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
People who boast of happy marriages are, I submit, usually self-deceivers, if not actually liars. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
... half the world starves. What a planet. And the eating, if you're lucky enough to do any. Stuffing pieces of dead… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
A long marriage is very unifying, even if it's not ideal, and those old structures must be respected. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
any writer is inevitably going to work with his own anxieties and desires. If the book is any good it has got… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
Falling out of love is chiefly a matter of forgetting how charming someone is. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
One doesn't have to get anywhere in a marriage. It's not a public conveyance. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
“I think being a woman is like being Irish... Everyone says you're important and nice, but you take second place all the time.” — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
Art is the final cunning of the human soul which would rather do anything than face the gods. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
emotions really exist at the bottom of the personality or at the top. in the middle they are acted. this is why all the… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
I have used the word "attention," which I borrow from Simone Weil, to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
Starting a novel is opening a door on a misty landscape; you can still see very little but you can smell the earth and… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
Art and morality are, with certain provisos…one. Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love. Love is the perception… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
being homosexual doesn't determine a man's whole character any more than being heterosexual does. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
All artists dream of a silence which they must enter, as some creatures return to the sea to spawn. — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
“Oh if only I could take my mother away and never know of these things again. But it was impossible, the machine would go… — Iris Murdoch Copy Share Image
